German co-op federation, Deutsche Genossenschafts und Raiffaisenverband (DGRV) will supply the National Confederation of Cooperatives (NATCCO) a computer program for supervision of cooperatives.

The software is Alerta Temprana – Spanish for “early warning” – which will enable co-op management and regulators to see the financial condition of a cooperative in real-time so management, inspectors and regulators can immediately decide and make appropriate actions.

Alerta Temprana is already being used by co-op federations in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela through efforts of DGRV.

Version 3.1 of the program was created in 2004 and is being consistently upgraded by DGRV’s Lino Robledo and Lizbeth de la Guerra. According to de la Guerra , the first version of AS (Version 3.1) could do only 10% of the current Version 4.

Mr. Robledo is from Chile and is Chief of the DGRV Competence Center for the Regional Project in Latin America and is a computer programmer by profession. De la Guerra is Mexican and an Accountant. The tandem has collaborated successfully to make Alerta Temprana the supervision software of choice for South American co-op federations.

Together with DGRV Southeast Asia Director, Christian Albrecht, Kathy A. Lising of the NATCCO Consultancy Group, and Jeff Magsalay who is Technical Assistant for the NATCCO Stabilization Fund, Robledo and de la Guerra have met with the NATCCO IT Group for two weeks in November.

De la Guerra says that users in South America do not need to manually enter co-op financial data in Alerta Temprana, as it is already integrated with the systems used by the co-ops. Philippine co-ops, however, will still have to manually input the data from their systems to AS. “But that does not minimize the usefulness of Alerta Temprana, says Kathy Lising of the NATCCO Consultancy Group, since “A.S. is capable of generating COOP-PESOS report (standards required by the Cooperative Development Authority), Risk Management, Benchmarking, and even Scenario Testing. This allows co-op management to see how decisions will affect the Financial Statement!”

A.S. will initially be used in co-ops that are members of the NATCCO Stabilization Fund. The Stabilization Fund is an “in-system” regulation for savings and credit cooperatives and focuses primarily on the prevention of financial losses. Its mission is to provide a sound system and a mechanism to maintain the financial solvency, liquidity, operational stability and soundness of co-ops through a deposit fund, monitoring, inspection and capacity-building.